About Me

I teach and research the 20th century history of Wales and Britain. I am particularly interested in questions of identity and popular culture and I've published various books and articles that look at popular sports, obscure sports, national identity, historiography, disasters and local government.

My last book was Wales since 1939 (Manchester University Press, 2012). It's the first major survey of Wales in this period and has a particular emphasis on social history and national identity. Further information and supporting material for the book can be accessed at the book's website.

I am currently working on projects on the histories of Christmas and British boxing and on the role of history in Welsh culture. My work on Christmas will be for a book looking at the festival in Britain from 1914 to the present day.

I co-edit the journal Sport in History, am a past chairman of the British Society of Sports History and a current executive member of Llafur: The Welsh People's History Society.

I am a regular contributor on history, sport and politics to the Welsh print and broadcast media. I tweet about history at @martinjohnes

Areas of Expertise

Modern British history; Wales since 1939; history of sport and leisure

HI-M39Research Folder

This module is designed to help students to identify a dissertation topic appropriate to their interests and expertise, and to tackle the problems of methodology, develop the research techniques, and undertake the project planning which are the necessary preliminaries to researching and writing a 20,000 word dissertation.

HIH122Making History

History is an imprecise art and what historians say and write about the past is not the same as what actually happened in the past. Most people's knowledge about the past doesn't come from professional historians at all but rather from 'public history'. Public history is the collective understandings of the past that exist outside academic discipline of history. It is derived from a diverse range of sources including oral traditions, legends, literature, art, films and television.
This module will introduce you to the study and presentation of the past. It will consider how the content, aims and methods of academic and public history compare and contrast and you will engage in your own small research project to investigate this. The module will also teach you about the fundamentals of studying and writing history at university. You will learn about essay writing, group work and critical analysis and employ these skills to understand and assess history today, both as an academic activity and as public knowledge.

This survey of modern Welsh history from the 1847 report on the state of education in Wales, to the social reforms of the Attlee government at the end of the Second World War, traces the emergence of Welsh identity through key developments such as temperance and the Sunday Closing Act, religion and the disestablishment of the church and the emergence of Welsh national institutions. It considers how Welshness adapted to and intersected with other loyalties, defined by race, gender, class and empire, and it deals with the changing social and cultural scene which saw anglicizing influences alter demographic and linguistic patterns in Wales.

HIH3222The Long 1968: Protest in a Global Perspective, 1960-1980 (II)

Student activism, worker unrest, anti-war agitation, the civil rights movement, feminism – why did protest explode on a global level in the 1960s and 1970s, and what were the consequences? In this module, we will explore this question through a series of seminars focused on the analysis of a range of primary sources. We will look at forms of protest that transcended national borders, and will consider the ways in which protest movements were interconnected at a transnational level. We will also seek to place these protest movements within the broader history of the Cold War, and assess their impact on contemporary politics, culture and society. With HIH 3221, this module forms the second part of a two-part Special Subject and will allow students to deepen their knowledge and understanding of the main historiographical problems, debates and primary sources concerning this period in history. Students taking the module will focus in particular upon primary sources relating to the 1960s and 1970s.

HIH3300History Dissertation

The History dissertation is a free-standing, 40-credit module that runs across both semesters of Level Three. Candidates conduct research upon a subject of their choice, devised in consultation with a member of staff teaching for the degrees in History, and concerning a topic that falls within staff research and teaching interests.